Forum Discussion

Malcolm_Murray's avatar
Malcolm_Murray
Practitioner II
11 months ago

Randomisation of users filtered by a segment for a canvas or campaign

Hi there, I was just wondering if anyone could clarify whether or not user selection for canvases / campaigns is randomised, or will users always be entered into a canvas in the same order after ru...
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  • AllanHeo's avatar
    AllanHeo
    11 months ago

    Exciting update Malcolm_Murray  🙌🏻

    5th Canvas trigger: user 5

    I'm more inclined to believe that user entry is random each time! 

  • Malcolm_Murray's avatar
    Malcolm_Murray
    11 months ago

    Braze support have just got back to me and confirm that user entry is indeed randomised, so this backs up your findings AllanHeo. The response from support on this was:

    "Regarding the entry of users into your canvas, it's indeed will be randomized based on the specific filters you have set for your canvas. However, in your particular case, it's also worth noting that some users who have previously entered your canvas might still qualify to re-enter it after 2 days, depending on the re-eligibility setting you have configured."

    So, this is good news as it appears that canvas entry does indeed work in the way that I'd hoped. Was a bit worried otherwise as it changes some major assumptions, that may have involved re-working some of our strategies.

    Thanks all for this, particularly AllanHeo for your tests to confirm this behaviour. Really useful.

Malcolm_Murray's avatar
Malcolm_Murray
Practitioner II
11 months ago

Hi AllanHeo - yes that's right, I'm wanting to confirm if users are entered into a canvas randomly each time a canvas is run. The reason being that I've got some daily API driven canvases that target the same set of users. I use connected content to generate message content, and in some cases this can abort the run for a given user if they don't meet some other criteria on our API. If a user has been sent a message, then they won't be sent the same one again, and we limit the daily sends. Users then become re-eligible to receive after a certain amount of time has passed (time since message sent).

What I'm worried about is that if user entry is not random, then over time we'll basically end up only trying to send to people who cannot receive the message. If it's random then this is less of an issue. I had assumed user entry was random (I was sure I read that somewhere) but now I'm not so sure.

I'm in contact with Braze support about this, but haven't got anywhere yet. I'll update here when I do.

I'd be really interested to hear how your experiment goes.

  • AllanHeo's avatar
    AllanHeo
    Strategist
    11 months ago

    Hey Malcolm_Murray ! Thanks for the clarification and extra context. Knowing that you're working with an API-triggered Canvas, that makes testing a bit easier and faster as I won't have to wait for daily tests 🙂 

    Here's what I did for my test. I created an API-triggered Canvas with 5 eligible users, and I made the Canvas "Maximum users to potentially enter this Canvas = 1" in the Audience page. This means that each time my Canvas is triggered, it should get sent to 1 out of the 5 eligible users. What we're testing for is whether that 1 user will be random each time, or if it'll be the same user each time.

    1st Canvas trigger: user 1
    2nd Canvas trigger: user 2
    3rd Canvas trigger: user 1
    4th Canvas trigger: user 1

    I'm limited to one trigger per hour (Braze limitation), so I haven't been able to collect as much data as I would've liked so far... I want to say it's random just because of the single occurrence of user 2, but user 1 is getting entered suspiciously often. I'll do some more tests and let you know, and also, please let me know if you hear from Braze! 

     

  • AllanHeo's avatar
    AllanHeo
    Strategist
    11 months ago

    Exciting update Malcolm_Murray  🙌🏻

    5th Canvas trigger: user 5

    I'm more inclined to believe that user entry is random each time!